How can I extract multipart tar files from the command-line on macOS?

Question

I have multiple 2 GiB gzipped-tar files (.tgz) I downloaded from an online service with Safari. It's a Google Takeout of my entire photos library.

As each file downloaded, Safari automatically decompressed them so in the end I had 21 tar files in my Downloads folder.

How can I extract the contents of these multiple tar files?

Answer 1

The tar command-line program on macOS only supports a single filename as an argument. However a valid workaround is to concatenate multi-part tar archives and pipe this to tar's standard input. This can be achieved with the following example.

Given a directory of multiple tar files, the following command would extract their contents to the current directory, listing each file as it's extracted:

$ cat *.tar | tar --options read_concatenated_archives -xvf -

This assumes the files are named in the directory with the correct order for shell globbing.

Answer 2

In the Terminal, do

cd ~/Downloads ; open *.tar

(as a side effect, it opens the Downloads folder in the Finder)

It also works for *.tar.gz and *.tgz.